


the body electric

by 8611



Series: the body electric [1]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Canon-Typical Violence, Computer Viruses, Cyborgs, M/M, Mild Gore, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-02
Updated: 2012-12-02
Packaged: 2017-11-20 02:26:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/580260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are cables from his spine and circuitry under his skin and his body glows blue in the lights of the screens that surround him (Cyborg!Q).</p>
            </blockquote>





	the body electric

The boy’s skin is blue from the screens, and it makes the circuitry that sits just under his skin glow a bit, lines that track his bones from spine to hip and neck to elbows. 

M introduces them, and Bond realizes when the skinny boy turns around that he’s actually a young man, and although they’re faint, there are lines pressed to his forehead, very softly. He’s usually good at this kind of thing, but he can’t put his age in any bracket except for 20’s.

Maybe still a boy then. Except, no, because no boy has ever had hard lines of cable and cording snaking from his spine into the floor and walls, heavy things that fit into ports/vertebra. 

“007,” he says, and he has a soft smile, something very human. 

“This is Q,” M says, and her face is hard and her eyes glow the same blue. It is the last time M and Q will see each other.

(The old M, anyway. His M.)

\---

Q sends him with intel to Shanghai, and then to Macau with different intel, all tied up in neat little emails on his mobile. Q cannot find anything on the woman at the bar with talons and daggers for nails and eyes, but Bond isn’t surprised. Bond is sure that Sévérine isn’t on any lists, or in any databases. 

M sends him to Q when he gets back, when his hands are still shaking just a little bit and he keeps seeing a glass of scotch spilled on a pebble walkway. 

Q is standing in one corner of the room, hands moving across his screens as he frantically sorts data into neat little piles and folders, and when Bond lets the door close behind him loudly Q turns around, and in that moment, his eyes are black. They clear the next moment, returned to their muddy green color in a heartbeat, but it make Bond feel the need to reach up and touch his own eyes. 

“You’ve found yourself quite the computer wiz,” Q says with that soft smile, and Bond raises an eyebrow. 

“Rich, coming from you,” Bond says.

“I’m cheating,” Q says. “Unfair advantage and all that.”

“Yeah,” Bond says, tucking his hands into his pockets. “And all that. What can you tell me about him?” 

Q moves to join him in the middle of the room, and his cables come with him, heavy on the ground. Q has to tug at one that’s stuck in the corner with a little sigh, like he’s pulling on the hand of an unruly child. 

“Raoul Silva,” Q says. “Not his real name – it’s Tiago Rodriguez. Spanish national, former MI6 agent in the Hong Kong offices. He was captured and tortured by the Chinese and was actually assumed KIA until he resurfaced. Skilled hacker, as demonstrated.”

“Can you get anything off of the computers we brought in?” 

“Of course. I’m working on decoding the drives as we speak. They’re hooked into a main server rack up in the server room. I’ll know the minute the decryption stars.” Q taps his temple with a long finger before pulling off his glasses to clean them with a cloth out of his pocket. Without the heavy frames his fringe falls across his eyes. 

“All of this and the government couldn’t fix your eyesight?” Bond asks, incredulous. Q looks back up at him, and in one horribly unnerving moment Bond can see Q’s irises and pupils shift like the aperture of a camera. 

“My eyesight was fixed. These operate as a HUD system.”

The glasses go back on, and Q’s soft smile is back. 

“Anything else, 007?” Q asks.

Bond shakes his head, licks his lips, wonders what’s left of Q that’s run on blood instead of data. 

“Q branch will take back anything you managed to return with in one piece,” Q says, and Bond knows it’s a dismissal. He leaves with a thousand questions, leaves wanting to know what Q really is. 

\---

Bond chases underground trains without help, frantically looking for ghosts at Temple and finding nothing. It is only when one of the women from Q-branch calls him, frantic and breathless like she’s been running, that he finally finds out where Silva has headed. 

He never makes it inside, he is late, and he curses himself and steals a car with M in the back. 

He calls Q and gets a recording about Universal Exports, and would the caller kindly leave a message? He tries again and the same thing plays over. 

“Well that’s bloody inconvenient,” Bond says, tossing his mobile into the passenger seat and taking a hard right, making M grip the door and frown. 

“What’s inconvenient?” M asks. 

“Q’s decided to not answer the phone.”

“That’s impossible.” He looks at M in the mirror and sees that there’s something that might be worry on her face. “It means our systems have been compromised. When was the last contact you had with him?”

“Before Silva escaped.”

M’s mouth is a hand line, her eyes are dark, and Bond has to call the woman at Q-branch instead, asks her to leave a trail. She does her job well.

M dies because her femoral artery is hit in a firefight. Silva dies with a knife in his back. M dies like a solider even though she is not. 

“Last rat standing,” Bond says. 

\---

_(“Oh," Q says, confusion on his face, because they left him with emotions, and then his eyes flicker like a top, going black-white/green-black-white/green over and over again._

_He takes a shuddering breath in, then another one, and then, finally, screams and clutches at his head and drops to his knees, trying to dig into his brain with one hand and scrabbling at his inputs with the other. They’ll find the tips of his dominant fingers, his left ones, bloody and raw from attempting to pull Silva out of his head the manual way.)_

\---

A week after the funeral Bond thinks he starts having hallucinations, because Mallory shows up at his door with flowers. They look like the kind of thing one would get if they walked into a florist’s shop and asked for a sympathy bouquet. Bond tosses them on the kitchen table and goes to get them glasses and gin instead. 

They sit on the sofa, a dull leather affair (it’s an agency flat, Bond has no want to find his own at the moment), and stare at the white wall opposite them, not at each other. For a moment they don’t talk, and then Mallory sighs. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, and Bond shrugs with one shoulder. 

“I knew not everyone was going to make it out of this alive,” he says by way of answer. 

“You just assumed you’d be the one to die.”

Bond looks away at the low bookcase with the flat screen hanging above it, at the little ceramic bulldog sitting next to the TV remote. 

“I always assume I’m going to be the one to die.”

“You’re not doing a good job on that front.”

Bond looks at Mallory and there’s no levity in his face, only exhaustion. There is silence again for a bit, nothing except the sound of liquid in glass and two men swallowing while avoiding conversation. 

“I’ll be back in on Monday,” Bond says. They finish their drinks, and at the door, as Mallory is slipping his coat back on, Bond says, “I don’t try to die, you know.”

“No, but I have a feeling you enjoy riding a line there,” Mallory says. “You’re on desk duty until you’re cleared by medical and psych. Q-branch is down for the count anyway, things will take a while to settle.”

Bond knows, because Bond has tried calling Q every day since the funeral. Every day but the funeral, when it was sunny and gorgeous and M was permanently removed from his life. 

Bond continues drinking after Mallory has left, and he falls asleep with a blank mind.

\---

He is midway through four days of tests that he’s now taken twice in as many months when he gets a text message. He doesn’t read it until he gets back to the flat that night, because if he’s not actively receiving important information he doesn’t check his mobile. 

_I hear you’ve been looking for me, I apologize for vanishing._

It’s from a mobile number that’s not in his contacts, but he knows who it’s from. He reverses his steps, puts his shoes and jacket back on, grabs his keys, and finds himself back at SIS, standing in the sliding glass doors to the main room of Q-branch, where most of the computers are shut down and unoccupied for a the day, but there are a cluster of people up near the wall of screens at the far end of the room.

One of them is wearing jeans and a soft shirt that’s just a bit too big and mustard yellow Chuck Taylor’s. His glasses are missing and his head is shaved and his ports are gaping, ugly dark things at the base of his neck, vanishing below and hidden by his shirt. 

It’s only then that Bond realizes he hasn’t been annoyed with Q for not being available to help, he’s been worried. He can’t quite ascertain why, and this worries him. 

“Q,” Bond calls, and Q turns, wide-eyed and very human in his surprise. 

“Oh good, you got my text,” Q says, and Bond puts his hands in his pockets and walks over to join the gaggle of Q-branch techies. Q looks out of place in a way, relaxed and casual among his underlings all done up in suits and dresses. 

“Alright, then?” Bond asks. 

“Well, aside from being a human scrambled egg, just fine.” 

“Sounds painful.”

Q just smiles at that. 

“I’ve had worse.”

Bond wonders what’s worse than feeling like someone’s taken a whisk to your brain. One of the underlings coughs and they all slip away, leaving Q and Bond and a wall of computers that look clunky and archaic compared to the smooth modulation of Q’s normal surroundings. 

(There’s a halo on Q’s head made of a clean cut, half on its way to a scar, and Bond recognizes it as a cut he associates with autopsies, not surgery.)

“What’s worse?” Bond asks finally. 

“Have you ever been in a helicopter crash that leaves you blind, paralyzed, and clinically dead for just under two minutes?” 

“No.”

“It’s worse,” Q says lightly. “Although my connections are still healing, so this may turn out to be much more inconvenient.”

“More inconvenient than dying?” 

“You should know that dying is not at all inconvenient.”

Q looks up from where he’s flipping through paper, and they’re far enough apart that his eyes look human and Bond can’t see them modulating and moving. Bond is aware of his own breathing, his own skin, and he stares back at Q. 

“And if you don’t heal?” Bond asks. 

“Then I go back to work as the head of digital security. I wasn’t useless before they fixed me up,” Q says. “I’m not exactly in a position to go anywhere else – top secret, high tech, all those things.” 

Q grabs a mug from the table, takes a sip of tea, and Bond has more questions then when he came in. There are bandages on the tips of Q's fingers holding the mug.

“Stay alive, you’re useless when you’re offline,” Bond says, tossing off the remark, and Q smiles. 

“I’ll try,” Q says. 

\---

Bond goes to Bogotá, and St. Petersburg, and Hong Kong, because something is always going on in Hong Kong. 

He comes back for a few brief days between Colombia and Russia and goes to the mainframe, and finds dark screens and bloody handprints on the floor, left to dry. 

He doesn’t come back for a while after that, because Hong Kong takes its time to shake loose with the people he needs. 

He’s in a warehouse, armed with a drill, when the voice in his ear changes mid sentence. 

“There should be a lift shaft to-“

“-your right, ten meters ahead. Interesting choice of sidearm, 007. Dare I ask what happened to your Walther?”

Bond is aware that there is a smile on his face. 

“Welcome back, Q. How’re the eggs?”

“A bit less scrambled, thanks. New upgrades and such. How’s your gun?”

“Enjoying a holiday in the South China Sea, I’d imagine.”

There is a long-suffering sigh down the line. 

“If you’re not careful I’m going to start sending you out with drills in the future, and then you’ll just be James Bond, international handyman of mystery.” 

“Will they be coded to my palm print?”

“Naturally. Lift shaft on your right.”

Bond finds that the drill works quite fine, although at a somewhat closer range than the Walther. 

\---

When Bond comes back to return the equipment he brings the drill, and is extremely surprised to see Q sitting on the steel table at the far side of the room, cross legged and facing his wall of screens. There’s what seems to be a floating, see-through screen directly in front of him, which he’s using to control the rest of the computers, and just one single hard line from the back of his neck snaking down to a port in the floor. 

Q’s hair is growing back in, although in Bond’s opinion it’s not long enough, and when Bond slams the case of equipment down on the table next to Q he turns, and his glasses are still missing. 

“New HUD?” Bond asks, nodding at the strange, floating screen that Bond realizes is a hologram or something of the sort. 

“SIS liberated some new toys from the Americans for me,” Q says, sounding quite pleased. 

“Very charitable of them. I’ve brought you back the drill.”

There is an edge to Q’s soft smile. 

“No gun through?”

“No, I didn’t want to end its holiday early.”

“Of course not,” Q says, and sighs, but the smile is still there, and when he opens the case he sighs a bit more. “Bond, there is still hair and what are probably bits of scalp on this drill.”

Bond just shrugs. Q gives him a look. 

\---

(“I heard you left Q a dead bird on his stoop, you must really like him,” Eve says, and Bond gives her the same look that Q had given him two days earlier.)

\---

Bond is coming in one morning as Q is leaving, and Bond finds him in a mostly empty Q-branch with his shirt off, tugging at his hardlines. He’s been upgraded to four ports down his back (the others have left round scars where they once where) and avoids using the bottom three when he can, but he must have been directly interfacing with the mainframe. 

Bond puts the radio and watch down on the table and holds up a hand.

“Can I help?” Bond asks, and Q looks at him, guarded, doesn’t say anything for a moment. 

“Alright,” Q says finally, and Bond skims a hand down Q’s spine, making Q swallow loudly. Q had taken two of them out already, and the third one comes out easily enough, but when Bond gets to the top one, his main hardline, Bond realizes that he doesn’t actually know to take it out. 

“It twists to the right,” Q says, as if he knows, and Bond reaches up to carefully twist it, and then pulls, and is not prepared for the spike that comes out with it, a thin cylinder of polished metal that must be three inches long. He almost misses the way Q goes rigid for a moment after the disconnect, before relaxing with a long breath out through his nose. The circuitry in his shoulders and back goes dark as he breathes out, his skin returning to something more human.

“Bloody hell, where’s your brainstem?” Bond asks, staring at the plug. 

“Rearranged,” Q says, and his voice sounds rough. He takes it from Bond, tossing it on the floor with the other cables. 

When Q turns they’re close enough that Bond can reach out and rest a hand around the back of Q’s neck, over that ugly metal wound there, rough at the edges from scaring. Q freezes, and Bond thinks that he might even stop breathing for a moment. 

“It hurts you,” Bond says. 

“Not in the way you think,” Q says, and his voice is quiet and soft like that smile Bond saw when he first met him. “It’s a sudden cessation of information. The data stops, and my brain has to switch back on.”

“How did you survive with more of those to disconnect every night?” 

“I didn’t unplug. You’re still touching me.”

“I know.” 

Bond knows this must mean that Q never left, he stayed in the mainframe room at all times, trailing cables that he couldn’t free himself of, and Bond wonders if it’s a relief, his new cables and scenery up in Q-branch. It has to be. 

Bond runs a finger around the edge of the port and Q licks his lips, and for a moment there’s a spike of light over the main branches of Q’s circuits, and then they’re dark again.

“That’s interesting,” Bond notes, and Q bites his lip. 

“Outside stimulation,” Q supplies, and there is an edge of breathiness in his voice. “My body probably assumes that I’m plugging back in.”

“Good to know,” Bond says, and he finally drops his hand. “You’ll be happy to know that I’ve returned both watch and radio in working condition.”

“Excellent,” Q says. “Very much appreciated.”

“I do try.”

“No you don’t.”

“I try _occasionally_.”

Q’s grin is even, level. It’s human.

\---

Bond goes to Bogotá, and St. Petersburg, and Hong Kong, and then he comes home and spends a long month in London that he doesn’t mind being so long. 

Bond is sent to Mumbai and before he leaves Q says, simple and quiet, “come with me.”

The mainframe door opens under Q’s hand without need for a passcode or a retina scan. The room is dark until Q sets foot in it and then there is the hum of electricity and machines booting up, the screens glowing a soft blue. 

The handprints are gone, and Q stands in the middle of the room and fits in the three bottom hardlines with Bond watching before handing over the top one. Bond moves into his personal space, reaches around to fit the spike into the top port, and when he twists it, the metal warm under his hands, Q takes in a gasp of a breath, eyes fluttering closed, and there is light dancing and traveling down his circuitry. When he opens his eyes again they’re black, but he’s looking straight at Bond, smiling, breathing a bit hard. 

Bond trails a hand from the port to Q’s shoulder and then down his arm, pressing his first two fingers into the loop of light at the back of Q’s elbow. Around them the screens finish their boot up and data starts moving across them, clustering in the middle of each wall, closest to Q. 

“Your eyes look good in this light,” Q says, almost detached, like he’s making the simplest of observations. 

The kiss is brief and Bond knows that Q is miles away, spread across an information network as wide as the globe, but at least part of him is here, in this room, skin glowing blue, and his lips are warm.

“Good luck in Mumbai, 007,” Q says when they pull back. 

“I’ll bring everything back in one piece,” Bond says, and for the briefest of moments Q’s eyes are human again, and there is a soft smile there.

**Author's Note:**

> because AI!Q wasn't enough, I evidently needed cyborg!Q as well.
> 
> sorry for the MASSIVELY CLICHE title, but I couldn't stop myself once I thought about it. Much like every other work dealing with sci-fi stuff to use the title it has nothing to do with the original poem (W. Whitman, 1855, "I Sing the Body Electric") but whatever, it sounds really cool. 
> 
> Q's American toys are Stark Tech, natch.


End file.
